by Val McDermid
She found Plesch in her office, going through expenses claims. She gave Petra a grateful smile. ‘Petra. Bringing me facts, instead of these fictions, I hope?’
She shrugged and dropped into the chair facing Plesch. ‘More speculation than hard fact, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh well, never mind. It’s still a welcome distraction. What’s on your mind?’
She placed the print-outs in front of her boss. ‘Europol bulletin this morning. The Dutch police are looking for possible connections to a murder they’ve got in Leiden. It so happens that I was reviewing unsolved murders last week, in the run-up to this undercover operation. Just to see if there were any we might be looking to connect to Radecki and Krasic. I came across a case in Heidelberg that looked vaguely promising, so I asked them to send me a full report. When I went through it, it was clearly not one of ours. But then when I read the details of the Dutch murder, all the bells started ringing. I checked it out, and there are some very striking points of similarity.’
Plesch picked up the papers and read them, her expression deepening to a frown as she noted the common ground between the two cases. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said when she got to the end.
‘There’s more,’ Petra continued. ‘There’s been another murder in Bremen. I pulled the files on it because it reminded me of the case in Heidelberg. The MO is identical.’
Plesch raised her eyebrows. ‘The same weird, fucked-up bastard?’
‘Looks like it. So what do we do?’
Plesch shrugged. ‘We get on to Heidelberg. It looks like that’s Case Zero. They probably haven’t read their Europol bulletin out there in the sticks. They’ll have to liaise with this Dutch cop through Europol. And talk to the people in Bremen.’ She blew a breath out through pursed lips. ‘Rather them than me. What a nightmare. All that red tape and diplomacy.’
‘Couldn’t we keep hold of it?’ Petra asked.
‘On what basis? It’s not organized crime, it’s not our remit.’
‘We made the connection. We’re experts in intelligence analysis. We’re used to working with Europol.’
‘You’re kidding me, right? As if you haven’t got enough on your plate with Radecki. Come on, Petra, this isn’t our kind of thing, and you know it. Let me call the chief investigator on the case in Heidelberg and set the ball rolling. You’ve done a good job, spotting this. But you’ve got to let it go now.’
Before Petra could argue further, the door burst open without ceremony and The Shark stood there, pink-faced and bright-eyed. ‘Sorry to butt in, ma’am,’ he gabbled. ‘But this case that Petra showed me the bulletin about – something’s just come in on the wire. It looks like there’s another one. Only in Köln this time.’
26
Petra had been right about the boat, Carol thought. This was no rich man’s party toy. It was a wooden motor launch, perfectly proportioned, with a sloping roofed cabin amidships. Tadeusz told her he’d bought it as a virtual wreck because he’d fallen in love with its sleek clinker-built lines. He’d had it restored to its former glory, and now it was an immaculate museum piece that was as functional as when it had been built in the 1930s. Gleaming brasswork and polished mahogany caught the light wherever Carol looked in the small cabin. No space was wasted; the three-sided bench had slots for the table to drop into it, making a narrow double bed. The bulkheads had stowage space built in, using every nook and cranny without adversely affecting the elegant proportions of the compartment.
Above and behind the cabin, a tall, morose man leaned on the wheel, waiting for the word from Tadeusz to cast off. ‘He doesn’t speak more than two words of English,’ Tadeusz had said as he helped her aboard. ‘He’s a Pole, like me. We’re the best sailors in the world, you know.’
‘I think we English might want to dispute that,’ Carol said.
He inclined his head in rueful acknowledgement. Today, he looked nothing like the serious businessman she’d seen so far. Dressed in jeans and a thick fisherman’s jersey, a woollen cap jammed over his hair, he resembled every other waterman she’d seen on the short walk from the car to the boat. Only his hands were a giveaway, smooth and uncalloused by hard work. ‘Let me show you my boat,’ he insisted, ushering her below. He stood back, waiting for her to take it in.
‘She’s a beauty,’ Carol said, meaning it.
‘I suspect she was built for someone quite high up in the Nazi party,’ he admitted. ‘But I’ve never researched it. I think I’d rather not know. It might spoil her for me if I knew too much about her past.’
‘A bit like a lover, then,’ Carol said, her wry smile taking any flirtatiousness out of the remark. The irony of his comment was not lost on her; that he too made his money from misery seemed blindingly obvious. For Tadeusz to paint himself as higher up the moral totem pole than the boat’s putative original owner was, she thought, repugnant. Such ethical blindness would make it easier for her to play her devious game, however.
‘I suppose,’ he said, his answering glance amused. ‘So, a drink? Then we’ll go up on deck and I can play at being a tour guide.’ He opened one of the wooden hatches and revealed a tiny fridge containing beer and champagne. ‘It’s too small for full-sized bottles,’ he said apologetically, holding up a half-bottle of Perrier-Jouët. ‘This OK?’
A few minutes later, they were sitting on the stern bench, champagne glasses in hand as the helmsman cruised gently out of the Rummelsbergersee into the broad reaches of the River Spree. ‘Are we talking business today, or just getting to know each other better?’ Carol asked.
‘A bit of both. I wanted to show you the city from a different perspective, and I thought maybe you could tell me something more of your plans.’
Carol nodded. ‘Sounds good to me.’
The boat swung left and turned into the mouth of a lock. As they waited to go through, Tadeusz told her tales of the commercial barges. How they’d shifted twenty thousand tonnes of rubble a day during the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz. How a routine customs inspection had revealed a bargee’s dead wife buried in the coal bunker. How the river police were called the duck police.
‘You seem to know a lot about life on the waterways,’ Carol said as they sailed on through Kreuzberg towards the Tiergarten. The trees that lined the canal were heavy with blossom, lending an air of romance to what was, after all, a commercial transport route.
‘A certain amount of my business depends on the waterways,’ he said cautiously. ‘As you’ve discovered for yourself, I like to know who I’m dealing with, so I’ve talked to many schippermen over the years. Having the boat makes it easy for me to be among them for legitimate reasons.’
‘Surely you don’t cruise all over Europe? It would take ages.’
‘Usually I have the boat lifted out of the water and towed to where I want it to be. Then I do a little cruising, and a little business.’ He smiled. ‘All very unsuspicious, no?’
‘Very clever,’ she acknowledged, pleased that her masquerade was finally beginning to produce some hard information.
He pointed out various landmarks as they continued along the canal and into the River Spree again. As they turned into the Westhafenkanal, Tadeusz waved his arm towards the right bank. ‘This is Moabit. Not always the nicest part of Berlin, I’m afraid. There were some rough turf wars here between the Albanians and the Romanians, fighting over who got to run their prostitutes where. Low-life stuff, not the sort of thing that interests business people like us.’
‘What interests me is supply and demand,’ Carol said. ‘You can supply me with what I need, and I can supply the paperwork they’re paying for. For a price, of course.’
‘Everything has a price.’ Tadeusz stood up. ‘Time for more champagne,’ he said, disappearing below.
Damn, Carol thought. She was fed up with this. Not that he wasn’t a charming and entertaining companion, but if she’d wanted a guided tour of Berlin, she could have climbed aboard an open-topped bus. It wasn’t easy to sit back and appreciate the architecture when
her survival required her never to let her guard drop. She wanted to cut to the chase, because the sooner they got down to business, the sooner this whole operation would be over and she could return to her own life.
Tadeusz returned with another half-bottle of champagne. ‘OK. We have a little way to go before the next really scenic bit. So maybe you can tell me what it is you think I can do for you.’
Carol sat up straight, assuming the body language of someone engaged in serious discourse. ‘It’s more what we can do for each other. Are you going to be straight with me this time, or are you still pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about?’
He smiled. ‘I’ll be honest with you. I did make some preliminary inquiries to see if you were who you claimed to be.’
‘As I did with you,’ Carol interrupted. ‘I wouldn’t have made an approach to you if I hadn’t taken a long, hard look at your professional pedigree. So, am I the woman I say I am?’
‘So far, things have checked out. My associates are still asking around, but I’m someone who sets great store by gut reactions. And I have a good reaction to you, Caroline. You’re clearly smart, you’re cautious but you can be bold when that is what will get results.’
Carol made a mock salute with her glass. ‘Thank you, kind sir. I’m glad to see we operate in the same way. Because, in spite of all the good things I’d heard about you, if I hadn’t taken to you on that first meeting, I’d have disappeared into the night and you’d never have seen me again.’
He draped his arm along the stern rail, not quite touching her, but making a statement of physical closeness nevertheless. ‘That would have been a pity.’
‘It would have cost you a lot of hassle that I can save you,’ she said, firmly bringing the conversation back to the purely professional. It didn’t hurt her campaign if Radecki started to fall for her, but she had to play hard to get, to keep him at arm’s length. She couldn’t afford to let romance blossom to a point where it would start to seem odd that she wasn’t sleeping with him. Even if she wanted to, which she reminded herself forcibly she did not, it would destroy her mission, devaluing everything she had found out about him and his business. If Radecki could demonstrate that they’d been to bed together, it would be a gift to a defence lawyer, turning her testimony from the reliable evidence of a respected police officer into the bitter revenge of a woman scorned. Besides, it would be utterly unprofessional. And Carol didn’t do unprofessional.
‘You think so?’
‘I know so. You were delivering between twenty and thirty illegal immigrants a month to Colin Osborne. The only trouble was that Colin bullshitted you about what he could actually supply. He didn’t have access to the kind of paperwork your customers were paying for. That’s why he had to double-cross them before they realized he was bluffing.’
‘I didn’t know about this,’ Tadeusz said.
‘I don’t suppose you did. This isn’t a business where dissatisfied customers turn up at the Customer Services desk asking for their money back,’ Carol said acidly. ‘Once they were in the hands of the immigration people, they were either deported or stuck in detention centres. There was no way for them to contact whoever they’d paid their money to in the first place. And Colin was always clever enough to make sure the businesses they were working in couldn’t be tracked back to his door. He used fake names to rent the premises, he always made sure any stock was cleared out before the raids happened. He didn’t even lose the sewing machines. It was a shitty way of doing business.’
Tadeusz shrugged. ‘I suppose he thought he was doing what he had to to survive.’
‘You think so? That’s not how I do business. If you’re going to work outside the law, you need to be more honest than the straight people.’
He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘If you operate in the straight world and you don’t deliver what you promise, you maybe lose your job or your marriage, but mostly nothing truly terrible happens to you. But if you operate in our world and you let people down, sooner or later it costs you more than you’re willing to pay. You sell fake drugs on street corners and you’re going to take a beating, either from ripped-off customers or from other dealers. You double-cross your mates on a bank job and you’re looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life.
‘Take Colin. If he did the dirty on one deal, chances are he did it on others too. And look what happened to him. Head blown off on a dirt track in the middle of the Essex marshes. Now, I don’t want that to happen to me, so when I do business with people, I do it honestly. And I expect the same from them.’
Tadeusz had drawn his arm back halfway through her speech. He was looking at her with a strange intensity, as if she was giving voice to his most deeply held beliefs. ‘You’ve obviously thought a lot about this,’ he said.
‘I’m a survivor,’ she said simply.
‘I can see that.’
‘Look, Tadzio, I’m a smart woman. I could have made a reasonable living in the straight world. But I didn’t want to make a reasonable living. I wanted to make a lot of money. Enough money to stop when I was young enough to enjoy it. So I found a way to work outside the system. And I’m bloody good at it. I try not to mix with other criminals unless I have to, I cover my tracks and I deliver on my promises. Now, are we going to do business?’
He shrugged. ‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On who killed Colin Osborne.’ He raised his eyebrows.
She hadn’t expected that, and she was afraid her face showed how startled she was by the question. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Colin’s death was very opportune for you. And nobody seems to know what exactly happened to him. No one has claimed responsibility. Usually, when one villain takes out another, they’re eager to capitalize on it. Respect, fear. You know how it works. So, Caroline, did you kill Colin?’
She didn’t know what the right answer was. He could be bluffing. He could know more than he was letting on, and this was a test to see how far she’d go to earn his good opinion. He might want her to be the killer, as evidence that she was prepared to be ruthless. Or he might be put off dealing with her if she claimed the kill, uneasy that her way of dealing with the competition might rebound on him in the worst way. ‘Why would I do that?’ she stalled.
‘To muscle in on his trade.’
She shrugged. ‘Why would I need to take that route? All I’d have to do would be to come to you with a better deal. I suspect you could supply enough bodies to keep us both happy.’
‘You didn’t, though, did you? You didn’t come near me till Colin was well out of the way.’ There was a hard edge to his voice now, and his eyes had lost their warmth. ‘That makes me suspicious, Caroline. That, and the fact you look so like Katerina. OK, Colin never met Katerina. But if he was halfway good at what he did, he would have checked me out. He would have seen photographs of Katerina at least. And then, when she died, maybe he thought this was the chance to set up some kind of sting using you to get to me. Only, you decided to eliminate the middle man.’
Carol was unnerved. He was wrong in almost every detail, but he was wrong in the right sort of way. Suddenly, they’d shifted from easy companionship to the edgy realm of suspicion. She didn’t know what to do.
She set her glass down and stepped away from him, folding her arms across her chest. ‘Let me off this boat.’
He frowned. ‘What?’
‘I don’t have to listen to this shit. I came here in good faith to do business. I’m not going to stand here and take accusations of murder and conspiracy from you. Tell your man to let me off this boat, now. Unless you want me to start screaming?’
Tadeusz looked amused. ‘You’re overreacting.’
Carol let the flare of anger show in her face. ‘Don’t you dare patronize me. You’re just another gangster, Tadzio. You’ve got no right to come the moral high ground with me. I don’t have to account for anything to you. And I certainly don’t want to do business with
somebody who thinks I do. This is a waste of my precious time. Now let me off the boat, please.’
He took a step back, clearly unsettled by the vehemence of her reaction. He said something to the helmsman, and the boat veered towards a narrow wharf where a couple of launches were moored. ‘Caroline, I didn’t mean to offend you,’ he said as she moved to the side of the boat nearest the wharf.
‘And that’s supposed to make me feel better?’ The boat pulled alongside and, without waiting for the helmsman to tie up, Carol jumped ashore. ‘Don’t call,’ she threw over her shoulder as she marched up the wharf towards a flight of stone steps. Her whole body was trembling as she reached street level. She checked that he wasn’t following her, then stepped to the kerb to hail a cab.
She hoped she hadn’t wrecked the operation. But she hadn’t been able to think of anything else to do. His suspicions had come out of a blue sky, and she’d allowed herself to sink into complacency, so she hadn’t been quick enough on her feet to talk him round. She sank back into the cab seat and prayed she’d got it right.
The small plane from Bremen to Berlin was configured with a single seat on one side of the aisle, which meant Tony could look with impunity at the crime scene pictures Berndt had handed him at police headquarters in Bremen. He took them out of the envelope with some trepidation. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing the mutilated corpse of a woman he had been acquainted with. There was always something bizarrely intimate about poring over photographs of the dead, and he didn’t want such familiarity with someone he had known in life.
In the event, it wasn’t as bad as he had anticipated. The harsh glare of the flash had made the images of Margarethe’s body impossible to connect with the lively woman he remembered. He studied the photos in detail, wishing he had brought a magnifying lens with him. To the naked eye, there seemed to be no significant differences between the body of Margarethe and Geronimo’s other victims. They were all laid out in similar fashion, their clothes cut away to form an improbable table cover beneath them, the incongruous wound left by the scalping almost identical.
